We were just reaching the summit of a hill, and the pyramids stood out clearly on the horizon. She held back her camel and stretched out her hand to the east, in a gesture which was so touched with emotion that it became solemn.
‘Long after our houses, our palaces and ourselves have disappeared, these pyramids will still be there. Does that not mean, in the eyes of the Eternal One, that they are the most useful?’
I put my hand on hers.
‘For the time being, we are alive. And together. And alone with each other.’
Casting a look around her, she suddenly adopted a mischievous tone:
‘It’s true that we are alone!’
She pushed her mount up against mine, and, lifting her veil, kissed me on the lips. God, I could have stayed thus until the Day of Judgement!
It was not I who left her lips; nor was it she who separated herself from me. It was the fault of our camels who went away from each other too soon, threatening to overbalance us.
‘It’s getting late. What if we were to have a rest?’
‘On the pyramids?’
‘No, a little further on. A few miles from here there is a little village where the nurse who brought me up lives. She waits for me every Monday evening.’
A little to the side of the village there was a fellah cottage, covered in mud, at the end of a little raised path which Nur took, begging me not to follow her. She disappeared into the house. I waited for her, leaning against a palm tree. It was almost dark when she returned, accompanied by a stout easygoing old peasant woman.
‘Khadra, this is my new husband.’
I jumped. My staring eyes encountered a frown on Nur’s face, while the nurse was beseeching Heaven:
‘Widowed at eighteen! I hope that my princess will have better luck this time.’
‘I hope so too!’ I cried spontaneously.
Nur smiled and Khadra mumbled an invocation, before leading us towards an earthen building near her own, and even more cramped.
‘It isn’t a palace here, but you will be dry and no one will disturb you. If you need me, call me through the window.’
There was only one rectangular room, lit by a flickering candle. A faint smell of incense floated around us. Through the unshuttered window came a long lowing of buffaloes. My Circassian put the door on the latch and leaned against it.
Her tousled hair fell first, then her dress. Around her bare neck lay a ruby necklace, the central stone hanging proudly between her breasts. Around her bare waist, a slender belt in plaited golden thread. My eyes had never looked upon a woman so richly undressed. She came up and whispered in my ear:
‘Other women would have sold off their intimate jewellery first. But I keep them. Houses and furniture can be sold, but not the body, not its ornaments.’
I held her to me:
‘Since this morning I have resigned myself to one surprise after another. The pyramids, your kiss, this village, the announcement of our marriage, and now this room, this night, your jewels, your body, your lips…’
I kissed her passionately. Which dispensed her from confessing that as far as surprises went I had only heard the ‘Bismillah’ and the rest of the prayer was to follow.
But that did not come to pass before the end of the night, which was deliciously endless. We were lying down beside one another, so close that my lips trembled at her whisperings. Her legs formed a pyramid; her knees were the summit, each pressed close to the other. I touched them, they separated, as if they had just been quarrelling.
My Circassian! My hands sometimes still sculpt the shape of her body. And my lips have forgotten nothing.
When I awoke, Nur was standing up, leaning against the door as she had been at the beginning of the night. But her arms were heavy and her eyes had a false smile.
‘Here is my son Bayazid whom I conceal as though he were a child of shame!’
She came forward and placed him, like an offering, on my hands which were open in resignation.
The Year of the Rebels
921 A.H.
15 February 1515 — 4 February 1516
This son was not of my blood, but he had appeared to bless or to punish the deeds of my flesh. He was thus mine, and I would have needed the courage of Abraham to have sacrificed him in the name of the Faith. Is it not in the blade of a knife brandished by the Friend of God above a pyre that the revealed religions meet? I did not dare to commit this sacred crime, which I praise each year in the feast of al-Adha. However, that year, duty called me to do so straight away, because a Muslim empire was in the process of being born before my eyes, and this child was threatening it.
‘One day, Bayazid, son of ‘Ala al-Din, will make the throne of the Ottomans tremble. Only he, the last survivor of the princes of his line, will be able to raise the tribes of Anatolia. Only he will be able to reunite the Circassian Mamelukes and the Safavids of Persia around him and cut down the Grand Turk. Only he. Unless the agents of Sultan Salim strangle him.’
Nur was leaning above her son’s cradle, without knowing what torture her words were inflicting upon me. This empire whose destruction she was thus predicting was the one which my prayers had been invoking even before I knew how to pray, since it was the instrument which I had always expected would bring about the deliverance of Granada.
Now this empire was there, in the process of moulding itself before my eyes. It had already conquered Constantinople, Serbia and Anatolia, it was preparing to invade Syria, Iraq, Arabia Deserta, Arabia Felix, Arabia Petraea as well as Egypt. Tomorrow it would be master of Barbary, Andalusia, perhaps Sicily. All the Muslims would be reunited again, as in the time of the Umayyads, within a single caliphate, flourishing and formidable, which would impose its law on the nations of the unbelievers. Was I going to put myself at the service of this empire, dream of my dreams, hope of my hopes? Was I going to contribute to its emergence? Not at all. I was condemned to fight it or to flee. Facing Salim the Conqueror, who had just sacrificed, without the hand of God restraining him, his father, his brothers with their descendants, and who would soon sacrifice three of his own sons, facing this sword of the divine wrath, there was a child whom I was determined to protect, to nourish at my breast, until he became man, amir, destroyer of empire, and would kill according to the law of his race. Of all this I had chosen nothing; life had chosen for me, as well as my temperament.
Henceforth I had to leave Egypt, where Bayazid and his mother were in danger. Nur had kept her pregnancy secret, except from Khadra, who had helped her deliver the baby and had kept him since the first day. What if the nurse, already old, should die, and the child should be taken to Cairo, where his identity would be quickly discovered? He would then be at the mercy of Salim’s agents, of whom there were many in Egypt; he might even be handed over by Sultan Qansuh himself who, while distrusting the Ottomans to the utmost, was too afraid of them to refuse them the head of a child.
My solution was easily found: to marry Nur and leave for Fez with the child, where I could produce him as my own, in order to return to Egypt when he was older and when his age would no longer betray his origin.
As Nur was a widow, the marriage was a simple one. Some friends and neighbours gathered in my house for a meal, among them an Andalusian lawyer. At the moment that the contract was being drawn up, he noticed the icon and the cross on the wall. He asked me to take them down.
‘I cannot,’ I said. ‘I promised the owner of the house not to touch them until his return.’